Deprecated Functions Will Cause Sites to Crash With PHP 5.3

**TopDogger** · 12 November, 2009, 20:43 PM

It looks like a list of functions have been formally deprecated in PHP 5.3 and may cause lots of PHP sites to crash when the server is upgraded.

http://docs.php.net/manual/en/migrat...deprecated.php

Many popular shopping carts will be crashing when the server is upgraded to PHP 5.3. There is a lot of legacy code that has not been removed from a lot of popular scripts.

It does seem kind of stupid for the PHP team to generate a PHP error, rather than a warning, to let developers know that they need to upgrade the code.

Zen Cart is vulnerable, and because it is based on osCommerce, I suspect osCommerce will also crash. The Zen Cart team already has a patch set up. If you run a Zen Cart site, get the patch here:

PHP 5.3 Support - Zen Cart Support

**Nathan** · 12 November, 2009, 20:49 PM

Hopefully people don't dive in and upgrade to the latest version of PHP without knowing these changes. Seems kind of weird that PHP would make all of these changes in one update though.

**Shenron** · 12 November, 2009, 21:03 PM

I don't think Hosting companies will be upgrading their servers, at least major companies.

Thx for the heads up!

**TopDogger** · 13 November, 2009, 11:29 AM

Given the potential problems with the 5.3 update, I would hope that most hosting companies will give site owners some notice about an upgrade. The upgrade itself may be inevitable, because most hosting companies do periodically upgrade their services.

From my perspective, it would have made much more sense to generate warnings rather than errors. With warning messages, it would be easier to upgrade the code.

**Keldorn** · 13 November, 2009, 13:26 PM

I dont know about PHP 5.3, In PHP 6, the decprecated functions like Ereg() wont generate errors at all, except a fatal one that it doesn't exist. Any backwards compatibility is completely removed from the C source code of the php engine.